Sunday, April 23, 2017

Opening Monday of next week and running until July 30, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents a major retrospective of the
photographs of Irving Penn. The show marks the centennial of the artist's
birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Irving Penn
(1917–2009) mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that
is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance,
detail, and printmaking. Irving Penn: Centennial,
opening April 24, 2017, will be the most comprehensive exhibition of
the great American photographer's work to date and will include both
masterpieces and hitherto unknown prints from all his major series.

Long celebrated for more than six decades of influential work at Vogue magazine,
Penn was first and foremost a fashion photographer. His early
photographs of couture are masterpieces that established a new standard
for photographic renderings of style at mid-century, and he continued to
record the cycles of fashions year after year in exquisite images
characterized by striking shapes and formal brilliance. His rigorous
modern compositions, minimal backgrounds, and diffused lighting were
innovative and immensely influential. Yet Penn's photographs of fashion
are merely the most salient of his specialties. He was a peerless
portraitist, whose perceptions extended beyond the human face and figure
to take in more complete codes of demeanor, adornment, and artifact. He
was also blessed with an acute graphic intelligence and a sculptor's
sensitivity to volumes in light, talents that served his superb nude
studies and life-long explorations of still life.

There is a stunning 376 page catalogue to support the show: The definitive book on the work of a virtuosic and revered American
photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009) was among the most esteemed and
influential photographers of the 20th century. Over the course of a
nearly seventy-year career, he mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio
photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to
composition, nuance, and detail. This indispensable book features one
of the largest selections of Penn's photographs ever compiled, including
famous and beloved images as well as works that have never been
published. Celebrating the centennial of Penn's birth, this lavish
volume spans the entirety of his groundbreaking career.
Avaialble now on bookdepository at 29% off.

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz